無現金的世界

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/imagining-a-cashless-world

想像一個無現金世界

瑞典向我們展示了沒有紙幣可能是什麼樣的生活。

由Nathan Heller

瑞典的反現金運動現在必須與現金起義聯盟相抗衡。

幾年前，當一架被盜的直升機降落在斯德哥爾摩的一個現金倉庫屋頂上時，三名蒙面的男子砸碎了一個天窗，爬進了裡面這是2009年9月23日。這個倉庫是新來的，預計即將到來的瑞典工資日。與卡拉什尼科夫一起攜帶，入侵者在海灣擔任僱員，而他們的同夥在外面定位道路尖峰，以防止警車阻擋建築物。警方直升機之間設置了假炸彈，以拖延空中追擊。盜賊將袋子放在他們的飛機上，然後離開了。七名男子後來被逮捕並被判刑，但幾乎所有被盜的現金 - 據說約為650萬美元 - 仍未找到。

這次搶劫被稱為Västbergaheist，像許多雀躍者一樣，它成為公眾迷戀的源泉。 （這是Evan Ratliff的電子書“Lifted”的主題。）但是，它也從一些經濟理論家那裡得到了a ent的通知，他們看到了一個關於紙幣風險的比喻。現金是社會財富的棘手詭計 - 在物理上有一定困難，一旦在野外解放，幾乎不可能得到回報和金錢，因為技術在半個世紀以來發生了很大的變化。一天的事情一度要求鼓起口袋。現在可以購買雜貨，支付租金，購買午餐，召喚出租車，還可以償付姐姐的電影，而不用處理支票簿，更不用說帳單和硬幣了。大多數人認為卡和電子支付是便利，交換冷，硬現金的代價。然而，由美國前國際貨幣基金組織前首席經濟學家肯尼思·羅戈夫（Kenneth S. Rogoff）領導的理論家越來越多，他們正在接受這樣一種觀念：物理貨幣應該是例外而不是規則。

在一本新書“現金詛咒”中，現在哈佛大學教授羅戈夫（Rogoff）認為，在美國逐步取消紙幣，從大票據開始，慢慢讓小面額逐漸下降。他寫道：“紙幣已經成為全球金融體系順利運作的主要障礙。他的事業可追溯到十九世紀九十年代末，當時他發現國家貨幣供應價值的百分之六十是一百美元的鈔票 - 這是一個令人驚訝的比例，考慮到C-note在平常生活中幾乎沒有出現。此後，這個百分比已經上升了（現在大約是百分之八十），在任何時候都有銀行外面的1.34萬億美元。美國的每一個男女女孩都有四百二十美元的錢，他們的床墊裡的所有現金消失了？

Rogoff認為，看不見的大筆記本必須支付現成的工資。他們坐在蘇黎世的保險箱，可能是與卡特爾和販運者過境，並做其他可怕的事情。美元在兩個不穩定的經濟體（如菲律賓）和低位寡頭（中國，俄羅斯）都是非官方貨幣。淘汰大票將使國內貨幣更難在國外支持腐敗。一百萬美元的一百美元的鈔票很容易在一個購物袋裡，但一百萬美元的十美元票據重量不明的二百二十磅。打擊地下市場也應該避免逃稅，這是一個比許多人意識到的更昂貴的問題。最近的I.R.S.估計顯示每年需要支付四百六十億美元的稅款短缺，這是一筆轉移給付款人員的差距。羅格夫（Rogoff）認為，消除大票據對於非法移民而言也將更為有效，因為無證工人的工資必須以現金支付。

對許多經濟學家來說，最重要的是，低現金生活允許負利率，借款人支付借款人的利息。這些在歐洲和日本已經有限的使用，並且已經成為美國越來越受關注的問題（紙幣是一個障礙，因為如果利率下降了很多人會出錢，把錢放在襪子裡那麼至少呢，他們會得到一個零利率。）一些經濟學家認為，在全球經濟危機期間，像2008年這樣一個速度下降到負價格會有一個除顫器的效果：會有一個簡短的不過，那麼這個制度會再次抽搐，利率和通貨膨脹都將恢復健康的增長型區域。事實上，利率不能低於零，但是他們努力攀登。由於這些原因和其他原因，羅戈夫告訴我，一些以前懷疑的同事們熱切地提出逐步取消現金的想法。然而，認真考慮他在日本的情況，將需要尋找一個已經開始走向前景的國家。

那個國家是瑞典，是Västberga的主場。自從搶劫之時起，自去年的一百六十億瑞典皇冠或克朗至今七十七億美元的經濟衰退中，現金流通量大幅下滑。 2013年，瑞典取消了其最大面額法案，而對其第二大法案（即五百克朗票據（約六十美元））的要求令人驚訝地下降。到2014年，只有五分之一的瑞典零售交易正在以現金進行。 （在美國，略少於一半。）瑞典火車和公共汽車票務機通常只能拿卡;越來越多的咖啡館和酒吧和餐館也拒絕現金。大約一半的銀行分行不允許提款或存款。截至幾年前，“您可以看到瑞典走向真正的無現金社會的第一個跡象”，經營泛歐，廣場式交易服務iZettle的Jacob de Geer最近告訴我。 “許多較小的商店開始在門口貼上”我們不接受現金“。”在夏末，我飛到瑞典，看看沒有人想要你手中的錢是什麼樣的生活。

在斯德哥爾摩機場的完美無恙的火車上，一位黃色的襯衫指揮官說，如果我忘記買票，我可以支付票價，但只能用銀行卡。他說：“你可以在我們的小型候車室，車站的票櫃檯上，用瑞典現金支付，”他說，如果在一些落後的農村酒吧，可以用蘿蔔購買啤酒。他自豪地朗讀他的讀卡器。他不允許，不那麼自豪地說，要處理錢。

在從行李索取行程到火車平台的過程中，我已經通過了十台售票機，所有這些機器都沒有裝有硬幣插槽或現金托盤，而是配有精美的凹槽卡片。在火車上，小型前衛的屏幕設置在MasterPass廣告之間，MasterCard廣告和早上的新聞英文標題之間。 “一名二十七歲的博士生被指控從烏普薩拉大學竊取有毒物質，其中一項是閱讀”盜竊捷克共和國在比特幣大筆錢“的一個例子。即使是盜賊似乎已經轉向更好的事情了。

我沒有。我已經撤回了一系列瑞典法案，七百克朗（約八十三美元），美國的目標是讓自己受益於試圖在城裡度過。總和超過我習慣攜帶。鼓勵反現金人群的一件事是年輕人的行為; 2014年對大約一千名美國成年人進行的一項調查發現，超過三分之一的少於30人的卡片，即使是以不到五美元的交易即可獲得現金。當我通過我的信用卡進行交易時，我會得到欺詐保護，航空里程，以及可以導出到預算軟件和電子表格的數字記錄。當我使用現金時，我什麼都沒有：交易消失。已經在屏幕上訂購出租車和音樂的一代人不需要介紹無現金生活的樂趣。

一個主要的社會障礙是隱私。我們的電子生活的記錄是一個方便，除非是一個煩惱或更糟。在流行的想像中，黑市被大金屬現金支持。但許多地下交易更為溫和。紐約人經常僱用保姆和洗禮間的現金，不提交所需的稅務表格;服務員可以口袋提示，而不保留I.R.S的記錄。現金的可替代性使書呆子成為可能。我們願意忍受這一點反映了我們認為，大多數人在生活中最終會得到一些他們不會保留的記錄。

在進入我在斯德哥爾摩的酒店後，我去散步，趕上了時差。這個城市並沒有隱藏塑料的胃口。 Hötorget，一個舊的干草市場廣場的農民攤位，在巴基斯坦運送的芒果旁邊賣了瑞典香腸和夏季漿果。他們拿卡附近的花攤人員將夏季玫瑰花束花束揉成蕨菜。他們拿著美國運通卡。 [卡通id =“a20162”]

後來，我在Scandic Grand Central Hotel酒店溜進酒吧，並點了咖啡。調酒師頭髮髮絲，穿著神秘的熱帶襯衫。我解開了我的屁股“這是一個無現金的酒吧！”他驚訝的說。他指出，登記冊上面寫著一個“現金自由區”的標誌，並附上了一些硬幣和紙幣的圖片，覆蓋著一個巨大的“十”。

“這是一件新事嗎？”我問，感覺像是一個吸煙者，他嘴裡有一根香煙。

“這是一個新事物 - 兩三個月前，”他說。

“哦，有趣的，”我說。 “為什麼？”

他說：“更安全的人，”他說，給我一張信用卡收據簽字。 “現在寫總金額”。

瑞典似乎最接近於剔除紙幣，但丹麥和挪威則緊隨其後。比利時消費者交易的93％現在是無現金的 - 部分原因是像其他歐洲國家一樣，以現金支付合法金額的數額為限，澳大利亞的現金使用量已經下降了六分之一年份。印度的地下經濟被認為每年吞下四百六十億美元，已考慮加蓋現金交易和現金持有量;莫迪總理在最近的廣播電台中勸勉公民轉回現金。在整個撒哈拉以南非洲，只有三分之一的人口擁有銀行帳戶，但至少有60％的手機擁有手機，移動支付已經開始跨越紙幣。 （肯尼亞國民生產總值的四分之一是通過其付款應用程序M-Pesa來實現的）。中國永遠不會落後於移動支付，並取得了成功。我們花了兩年半的時間積累了錢，我們現在發現它使我們失望了我們想通過以太網航行。

瑞典似乎最接近於剔除紙幣，但丹麥和挪威則緊隨其後。比利時消費者交易的93％現在是無現金的 - 部分原因是像其他歐洲國家一樣，以現金支付合法金額的數額為限，澳大利亞的現金使用量已經下降了六分之一年份。印度的地下經濟被認為每年吞下四百六十億美元，已考慮加蓋現金交易和現金持有量;莫迪總理在最近的廣播電台中勸勉公民轉回現金。在整個撒哈拉以南非洲，只有三分之一的人口擁有銀行帳戶，但至少有60％的手機擁有手機，移動支付已經開始跨越紙幣。 （肯尼亞國民生產總值的四分之一是通過其付款應用程序M-Pesa來實現的）。中國永遠不會落後於移動支付，並取得了成功。我們花了兩年半的時間積累了錢，我們現在發現它使我們失望了我們想通過以太網航行。

然而，瑞典的領袖案例是截然不同的，由三個原因引起的。一些高調的搶劫行為，不僅限於Västberga的劫持者，將紙幣與公眾想像中的安全漏洞結合起來，並引導瑞典銀行櫃員工會等實體遊說反現金處理。 （自從無現金趨勢開始以來，銀行劫匪和街頭麻痺行為顯著下降）。瑞典金融業意識到，收費交易技術可能會比現金兌換帶來更多的利潤。而瑞典，一個關注數字先鋒的小國，一直是開發新的交易應用程序和其他工具的領導者。呼籲已經開始阻礙小城市企業。 HTL的前品牌總監GülHeper表示：“效率，簡單性 - 我們可以使用更現代化的系統，而且我們的員工更容易”，一個時尚，年輕的無償酒店連鎖店的品牌總監GülHeper告訴我。 “和安全。因為休息室開放了二十四小時，而且交通量很大。“在無現金的企業裡，你永遠不用擔心有人溺水。 “自從二月份以來，這家精品麵包店Fabrique的聯合創始人DavidZetterström表示：”你總是要有一個有錢的人。“八年前，當Zetterström和他的妻子開始麵包店時，所有交易中有三成或四十分之一是現金，而現金處理的費用似乎是不可避免的。最近，這個數字下降到不到10％，商人的信用卡交易費用也下降了。去年，Fabrique有四次入場，Zetterström決定是時候給無現金的東西了。

通過支持流行和流行，支持無現金的安全論證得到了幫助。 ABBA博物館 - 瑞典超級四重奏的藝術和藝術的互動式天文台 - 不採取現金，主要是由於BjörnUlvaeus的深刻信念，較小且較少鬍子的“B”。

“當先進經濟完全無現金時，街頭犯罪會發生什麼變化？”Ulvaeus在他的兒子遭到家庭搶劫後首次登記了現金風險，不久前以電子郵件的方式寫信給我。 “為什麼政客不要問這樣的問題？”

然而，昂貴的現金處理對於企業來說，銀行更是如此。現金要求運輸和支付的安全。通過賬單跟踪賬單是一種痛苦。金融機構可以通過卡交易和賬戶維護賺錢，但是現金全部無處不在，都有可疑的回報和越來越多的過時空氣。瑞典中央銀行瑞克斯銀行（Riksbank）最近加入了許多同行，研究塊式技術。 Riksbank經濟學家BjörnSegendorf表示，這是一個“開放的問題”，中央銀行今後是否會發行數字貨幣。

“我們不會在櫃檯上交出現金，”Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken執行副總裁Mats Torstendahl或瑞典四大之一S.E.B.一天下午告訴我。我們坐在他的辦公室裡，按照美國的標準，比瑞典語更大，在他桌子的桌子旁邊。當我們見面的時候，Torstendahl就好像陷入了一個生鏽的門把手。現在，他在高級金融家的權威休息室裡坐下了椅子。他整齊地分開了金發;圓形，玳瑁眼鏡;和瑞典銀行家的製服 - 一個很好的清醒的西裝，沒有領帶。在房間的每個窗戶都有一個精緻的蘭花。 Torstendahl說：“銀行有意識地將我們系統中的手動現金處理轉移到自動化現金處理中，以減少同事的環境風險。”

作為零售銀行產品負責人的不斷升高的經理PerLångves已表示：“現金實際上是世界疾病的主要載體之一！”

在瑞典，銀行不像美國那樣運行專有的A.T.M.s。相反，五大公司共同擁有A.T.M.公司，Bankomat。 Torstendahl堅持認為，每個分支機構也都有一個保險庫和一個現金處理櫃員，特別是鑑於過去十年的現金交易急劇下降。 “問一個瑞典客戶，”你有現金嗎？“我從來沒有現金，”我們正在考慮拿走現金。“不，你不能拿走現金！”但是你不有任何現金。“是的，但是如果我想要現金，你應該有現金。”但是你永遠不會有現金！“

他靠背然後微笑。 “你二十二點就有了現金。”

對於那些被低現金生活留下的人來說，瑞典的這個答案是依賴於三個數字：緯度，年齡和財富。在農村北部，銀行分行的兌換改變了日常生活。當地人，特別是那些擁有現金密集型企業的商店，如商店，現在開車很遠，找到一家滿足他們需求的銀行。 “你必須去一，二，三，四，五個銀行，直到找到一個，”Wiggo Lindgren說，一個豐滿的快樂養老金領取者，他是SmåföretagarnasRiksförbund或國家小型企業協會的副總裁，代表三萬家公司。今天，瑞典有五千三百萬人必須旅行超過十八英里以提取現金。林德格倫告訴我：“五分之一的人表示，如果現金消失，他們將不得不關閉他們的商店，那將是一場災難。 “我們想要的是某種現狀。”

停滯也適合老年人。有些老百姓不用無現金的經營方式。但是，許多人都在努力追踪債務，在智能手機上鵪鶉，忘記銀行卡所需的針腳代碼。除了方便的問題（一些廁所需要數字付款，老年人經常是緊急訪問者），而逐漸取消現金似乎至少有一個人口過早。 PensionärernasRiksorganisation的主席Christina Tallberg或國民養老金領取組織告訴我，在組織結算會議之後，老年女性司庫不得不在兩種公共交通工具上攜帶大量的錢，以便到達可以接受存款的銀行分行。

Lindgren和Tallberg的組織都加入了Kontantupproret“現金起義”，這是一個鬆散的現金保存聯盟。創始人是國際刑警組織前總裁BjörnEriksson，必須指出，代表裝甲車輛的瑞典私營保安公司協會主席等。現金起義認為，每個人都應該能夠在任何地方獲得和存入現金 - Torstendahl和其他人認為這樣顯而易見的觀點。 （“歷史有很多令人難過的人們試圖阻礙科學和技術和資本主義的例子”，ABBA的BjörnUlvaeus向我介紹了這個小組。）然而，現金起義並不是邊緣化的。瑞典消費者協會秘書長Jan Berftft表示：“當我和一個組織發言時，這實際上是一個重要的主題之一，這是他們非常生氣的關鍵挫敗感。” - 包括退休，殘疾和移民組織在內的團體。起義發表的社論對埃里克森所說的“這種使得盡可能難以使用現金的異常方式”至關重要。首先，它試圖向銀行提出上訴，但是他們不會參與。所以起義及其代理人轉向政客。

他們關注的一個主題是瑞典財政部副部長Per Bolund。六月下旬，克里斯蒂娜·塔爾伯格遞交了一份請願書，由139,064名養卹金領取人簽署，要求政府保護現金使用。 Bolund最近因為尋求庇護者的現金擔憂而贏得了一些政治點。 （他推動了一個可以讓他們快速獲得銀行服務的計劃。）[cartoon id =“a20369”]

我一天早上去政府辦公樓拜訪了博隆。他是一個高大的男人，一個男孩偵察員的寬鬆，有趣的笑容，他已經完成了綁繩，但擔心他是否做得對。他帶領我到辦公室一端的會議桌上，從玻璃瓶裡倒出熱水黑咖啡。他穿著一件深色西裝，帶著絲帶薄薄的深紅色領帶，被拉到我見過的最小的結裡。博朗對瑞典無現金傾向的態度是樂觀和謹慎的 - 也就是說，政治上是相當的。

他說：“這不是政府所認為的 - 我們將要成為一個無現金的社會 - 而是從底層開始發展。” “我會和私營部門進行對話，試圖指出他們有責任為所有公民提供支付服務。”

他說，一個模式可以是瑞典的酒精配置系統，允許在偏遠地區的瑞典人在最近的商店訂購和運送酒瓶。 （類似的藥物和包裹的系統。）博朗希望銀行考慮這樣一種現金安排。他說：“如果沒有私人行為者提供的解決辦法，那麼我們面臨著別的選擇，但是我們也沒有任何其他的選擇。”他說 - 但他傾向於讓需求，創新和時間運行他們的課程

他說：“我們有幾代現在進入經濟的年輕人，從來沒有使用現金，也沒有任何理由開始使用現金。”他繼續說。 “而且，當然，由於自然原因，老年人會”來到一個驚嚇的停止處，就像把處理者擺在一個適當的委婉語中一樣 - “擺脫了私人社會，這當然會帶動電子支付。由於自然原因！“

沒有時間的流逝可能會幫助未登記的窮人。在某些時候，我開始和斯德哥爾摩的扒手交往，他們都是外國人，不在瑞典的書籍和社會活動中。一個名叫阿塔納斯的一個好笑，灰鬍子的保加利亞人告訴我，通過幾句英文和一些巧妙的手勢，一個不法分子潛逃著八千克（約九百三十美元），讓他無恥。一名奧地利女子西格里德，坐在街角，針織，說，她的奧地利養老金被鎖定了。她一直在歐洲的各個城市蹦蹦跳跳。幸運的是，她沒有發現瑞典人在街上的現金比她遇到的任何其他國籍都不那麼自由，她已經設法省錢，在其他地方購買公交車票。 “你不需要銀行卡？”我問。西格德笑了起來“不，不，”她明亮地說。她年紀大很窮，只是在想像一個蓬勃發展的未來，沒有人想到的那種人，所以我希望她是正確的。

在每個歐洲城市，都有咖啡館，酒吧和餐館，這些圖騰都是一個年輕的國際化夢想。他們是酒館和多用途的地方。他們的客戶通常在四十五以下。第一手語言是全球英語，將現在擴展到連續，並使浴室“廁所”：屬於沒人的語言，所有人都是這樣。這些是外籍人士聚集的地方，感受到外國人少，當地人為避免失去聯繫。訪問是感到迷失，也是被發現的邊緣。

斯德哥爾摩最新的景點之一是游牧民族，距離中央車站僅有一小段路。星期一晚上，我停下了一盤肉丸。背部露台上的一些美國人正在玩撲克。我坐在裡面，旁邊的三個年輕女子聚集在餐桌旁邊喝酒。一個，黑髮和一個鼻樑，抓著一包煙草，分散捲起一根香煙。另一個是拜訪柏林人;第三，一個雀斑的加利福尼亞人。

加利福尼亞人正在討論工作和金錢。 “當你躺在床上，你會想，我希望我已經工作了超過二十個小時嗎？”她問。 “還是你會想，我希望我去那個地方嗎？現在我們很年輕無論如何，我們都會破產。是嗎？“

“你要花錢，”那個煙嘴的女人說。 “你要花費在音樂會的票上，在衣服上，在公寓上，無論如何。你會花費所以，像，確保你快樂你花了什麼。“

“旅行絕對是解決方案，”加州人說。

來自波恩的一個柳樹女人徘徊在一個背著一個穿著Fedora的秘魯人。 “我的室友！”

目前，每年在全球範圍內進行數千萬次交易的目標公司都是通過現金進行大部分事情。當您在手機上下載該應用程序時，您可以將其直接鏈接到您的銀行帳戶，而不是現有的卡號，與Apple Pay一樣。零售商在其登記冊上用指定的QR碼（這些像素化，雷達式條形碼）鍵入交易。 SEQR還具有對等功能，允許將錢發送給另一個用戶，並在某些寄存器中有一個“無接觸”接口。許多人對與手機業務有著內心的憂慮，但是Fredell堅持認為這是最安全的載貨媒介。

“當你想付款時，我們檢查一下：是SIM卡嗎？是。是硬件，同一台手機？是。你有針腳嗎？“他揮手自己的智能手機。 “這個電話號碼是唯一的，因為這個號碼是唯一的。”即使有人突破了一個手機上的所有互鎖鍵，下一次也要重新開始。 “這意味著它不是可擴展的欺詐，”弗雷德告訴我。這種精心安全的另一面是失去了隱私：大哥不能保護你不被看見。但弗雷德認為這個關切正在過去。 “最終，每個人都會用手機付錢，”他說。 “當他們這樣做會寫在星星”。

弗雷德里從嘴唇下拉出一個沉重的鼻袋，換了一個新的小包，並建議我們去購物。午飯時間下午輕輕地下了雨，但現在很乾燥。我們走到瑞典超級大賣場Hemköp之一，走向糖果部分，在那裡，Fredell掏出一小袋Ahlgrens Bilar膠糖。他把它帶到收銀台，並在手機上拍了QR碼。 “我正在等待收銀員投入數額 - 那裡就有了！”他唧唧唧唧。 “我做我的PIN碼，完成了。”收銀員給他收據。 “我不需要，”他自豪地說，舉起手機。 “我在這裡收到總收據。”

我以為我們已經購物了，但是Fredell記得他不得不買更多的鼻煙 - 我有一個希望，他總是買更多的鼻煙，所以我們走到煙草櫃檯，他再次做了QR碼，這個時間在一個巨大的，十個可口的一般鼻涕柱，用金箔包裝紙，看起來像一個從特朗普酒店的迷你吧搶劫的東西。在去另一家超市的路上，弗雷德爾吃了糖果，吸了鼻涕，談到了移動支付藥物市場。他在我的鼻子下面揮動了一個細長的卡片鞘。 “這是我的錢包 - 沒有現金！”他說。 “我從鰻魚皮中做出了我自己捕獲的東西。”[cartoon id =“a20003”]

對許多人來說，現金是指自主權，但對於年輕人或技術上的冒險者來說，這是對自由交換自由的抑制。這個概念的浪漫有助於說明瑞典最受歡迎的手機現金轉移應用Swish的成功。 Swish，像Venmo這樣的點對點服務，於2012年12月推出。不到四年後，瑞典人口的一半被使用，90％以下的成年人使用了三十歲。該服務立即移動貨幣;您只需要收件人的電話號碼。它的界面非常簡單，用於教堂收藏和其他籃球票價。 （在地鐵平台上一個晚上，我通過了一個標誌牌的Busker：“如果你沒有現金，用Swish付錢！”）去年夏天，瑞典第一個Swish摟抱，兩名暴徒打了一個男人，強迫他ish他們他們的帳戶迅速確定了罪犯。

該應用程序的成功令人震驚，因為它不是由時代精神專家的企業家所夢寐以求的。瑞典銀行設想，推動和資助瑞典銀行。在Bankomat型模式下，他們一起贊助開發，並聘請了一名營銷人員Per Ekwall，他們對這種新型無現金技術如何適應人們的需求有了深入的了解。

“我想，這是關於社會付款，”Ekwall一天早上告訴我，在他的公司，“世界愛”的辦公室。 “這是銀行考慮付款不是技術性的東西，也不是產品，而是作為一種社會的事情，是一個巨大的跳躍。除非我最好的朋友擁有它，否則Swish的價值是什麼。“

Ekwall集中在兩個組別，他稱之為創新者和管理員。創新者是早期的技術採用者。行政人員是“班級父母” - 組織學校活動和團體禮物的人們。管理員總是在安排事情，Ekwall推理，所以社會界的人們不斷欠他們的錢，並且下載一個簡單的應用程序來償還他們，如果要求這樣做。在營銷Swish，他積極地針對這兩個團體，理論上，幾乎所有人都會被拉上。

理論認定今天，一些瑞典銀行的交易量比A.T.M.多。取款。該應用程序也帶來了文化認同的元素。 “對瑞典社會來說很重要，”Anders Edlund，

有人抓住我的肩膀，在我耳邊大聲喊叫。那個男人穿著一件黑色的西裝和一件配有口袋方形的白襯衫;他的頭髮沾上了金色的頭髮。他說他的名字是亨利，他在周末在城裡遇見女孩。事實上，他說過，一個超級女孩正在這邊，我想見她嗎？煙大砲在他身後發火了。我說我總是很高興見到任何人。唯一的事情是，他說，我應該假裝我一直認識他。雖然我說我是一名記者，但他決定我是律師。我把自己介紹為內森，但亨利喜歡自己的版本：曼森。

亨利把我介紹給他的僚機，塞巴斯蒂安。他已經認識了塞巴斯蒂安多年，他說，雖然我現在有理由懷疑這個說法。 “塞巴斯蒂安，這是曼森，”亨利說。

“內森，”我說。

“馬森，塞巴斯蒂安，”亨利說，指著一條路線。 “一起到外面去吧。”

我們走到人行道上，那裡設有天井。街道更安靜當亨利用電話跟踪時，跟踪了“女孩”，我和塞巴斯蒂安談話，他是一位研究生，他從一個他所描述的“像”威權“從”權力遊戲“。

塞巴斯蒂安說：“他喜歡彌補這些複雜的故事，試圖給女孩留下深刻印象。” “例如，我應該說他是一個俄羅斯間諜。”塞巴斯蒂安的英雄是Elon Musk，他從來沒有見過他，而他被認為是一個模範的人。 “我真的以為我會為那個傢伙買一顆子彈，”他告訴我。

我們談到了Elon Musk的Hyperloop和美國的大選，以及冬天的瑞典火車的糟糕。亨利定期檢查更新：女孩在途中。在某些時候，他開始叫我Nitch。他靠近露台上的一個穿著穿著胡椒粉頭髮的人。 “你看起來很棒！”亨利宣稱。那個人是加拿大人埃里克，亨利也呼籲他留下來和超級女孩見面。 “這是Nitch，”亨利說，捏我的肩膀。 “我已經認識他了。

“內森，”我說。

“尼奇是意大利律師，”亨利說。於是我發現亨利正在和一群隨機的陌生人聚集在一起，和他一起出去玩，最好打動女孩。我感到他的注意感受到她的幸福。

亨利徘徊，因為它是超級女孩的生日，或者他說，他正在試圖讓她免費。令我震驚的是，像無現金生活一樣，國際大都市的流動性 - 跨越國界也不會變得更昂貴的錢，這種輕盈的信任帶來了財務透明度 - 它阻礙了另一種流動性。有一個現金的口袋，你可以是任何人：一個俄羅斯間諜，一個生日禮物，一個avvocato出去一個晚上在鎮上。以無現金的踪跡，你永遠是命運，一直是你一直以來的命運;你不能遠離你的名字，你的購買，甚至你的朋友網絡。你總是用你的卡片或手機，像你自己一樣出走。

對於那些缺乏瑞典人機構信任的美國人來說，無現金就是偏執狂。而對於美國政府來說，這可能意味著更多的不必要的事情。 Rogoff認為，無現金轉型的刺激細節將從其提示的事實上的監管中提升。突然，小型的大麻採購等，主要是忽視了超負荷的刑罰制度，會變得顯眼。保姆品種的稅收減免可以忽略不計，對於I.R.S.追求，會出現。美國人，自私自利的戀物癖者是否想要清楚自己？ “瑞典在做這些事情時非常快，他們是不可思議的，”羅格夫告訴我。 “但他們非常堅定。我不認為我們會如此堅定。這需要一段時間。“

在露台上，我們三個人 - 塞巴斯蒂安，埃里克和尼奇 - 開始談論錢。埃里克一直旅行很多，他在瑞典注意到了不同的東西。 “當我到達某個地方時，我有一個例行程序，”他說。他會去A.T.M.並取出現金。在瑞典，他一直在擺脫困境。也許有人說，這真的是貴重金屬。塞巴斯蒂安看著繁忙的街道。 “太奇怪了，”他說。 “我們需要食物。但是我們需要黃金嗎？我們需要銀色嗎？這些都是我們發現的。

我們想要什麼錢？亨利終於與他的超人女孩聯繫在一起，看起來像我曾經見過的一個人，把她帶到地毯上的樓梯走向他的奇異，臨時的地位，我開始認為，超越家庭和培養，我們尋求的是什麼大多數貨幣是一種消除夢想的方式。到目前為止，美國仍然擁有現金，因為我們的財富概念是物質的：我們收集它，處理它，囤積。美國的錢是私人的。瑞典更容易擁抱無現金，部分原因是它發現貨幣在轉移和速度，它遵循的社會路徑，它跟踪的債券的價值。這是社會：一個網絡的財富概念。這兩個概念在這樣的夜晚相遇，當幻想和友誼在空間和時間的隱藏中聚集在一起時，在瞬間的機會中相互重蹈覆轍。我們不是小偷，而是像我們一樣活著。

不久之後，我離開了，走向我的酒店。它清脆新鮮，我在一家餐廳停下來，延長了一個漫長的夜晚，只是稍長一點。 “我們不用現金，”女服務員說，當賬單來了。我很累費用很小。我付出了一點點的無罪釋放。 ♦

本文出現在2016年10月10日的其他版本的問題中，標題為“Cashing Out”。

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/imagining-a-cashless-world

Imagining a Cashless World

Sweden shows us what life without paper currency might be like.

By Nathan Heller

Sweden’s anti-cash movement must now contend with the Cash Uprising alliance.

Illustration by Nishant Choksi

Afantastic heist (we like our crimes as smart and magical as dreams) took place some years back, when a stolen helicopter landed on the roof of a cash depot in Stockholm and three masked men smashed a skylight to climb inside. It was September 23, 2009. The depot was freshly stocked in expectation of a coming Swedish payday. Armed with a Kalashnikov, the invaders held employees at bay while their accomplices outside positioned road spikes to keep cop cars from swarming the building. Fake bombs had been set among the police helicopters to delay an aerial chase. The thieves loaded bag after bag of bills into their aircraft, then departed. Seven men were later caught and sentenced, but nearly all of the stolen cash—reportedly some $6.5 million—still has not been found.

The robbery is known as the Västberga heist, and, like many capers, it became a source of public fascination. (It is the subject of Evan Ratliff’s e-book “Lifted.”) But it also earned astringent notice from some economic theorists, who saw in it a parable about the risks of paper money. Cash is the squirmy ferret of societal wealth—tricky to secure physically and, once liberated in the wild, almost impossible to get back—and money, as technology, has changed a lot in half a century. A day’s errands once called for bulging pockets. Now it’s possible to shop for groceries, pay rent, buy lunch, summon a taxi, and repay your sister for a movie without handling a checkbook, let alone fumbling with bills and coins. Most people think of card and electronic payments as conveniences, stand-ins for exchanging cold, hard cash. Yet a growing group of theorists, led in the United States by Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, are embracing the idea that physical currency should be the exception rather than the rule.

In a new book, “The Curse of Cash,” Rogoff, now a professor at Harvard, argues for phasing out paper money in the U.S., starting with big bills and slowly letting small denominations fall toward disuse. “Paper currency has become a major impediment to the smooth functioning of the global financial system,” he writes. His cause dates to the late nineteen-nineties, when he found that sixty per cent of the value of the country’s currency supply was in hundred-dollar bills—an astonishing proportion, considering how rarely C-notes show up in ordinary life. Since then, the percentage has risen (it’s now about eighty per cent), with $1.34 trillion outside banks at any moment. That’s nearly forty-two hundred dollars carried by every man, woman, and child in the U.S. Under whose mattress has all this cash vanished?

Rogoff argues that the invisible large notes must be paying off-the-book wages. They are sitting in Zurich safe-deposit boxes, probably, crossing borders with cartels and traffickers, and doing other awful things. The U.S. dollar is an unofficial currency in both unstable economies (such as the Philippines) and under-the-table oligarchies (China, Russia). Phasing out big bills would make it harder for domestic currency to support corruption abroad. A million dollars in hundred-dollar bills is easy to tote in a shopping bag, but a million in ten-dollar bills weighs an ungainly two hundred and twenty pounds. Hobbling the underground market should also temper tax evasion, a costlier problem than many people realize. The most recent I.R.S. estimates indicate a tax-payment shortfall of four hundred and sixty billion dollars a year—a disparity that’s transferred to those who pay. Rogoff speculates that eliminating big bills would also be a more effective deterrent to illegal immigration than, say, a border wall, because the wages of undocumented workers are, necessarily, paid in cash.

Most important for many economists, low-cash life allows for negative interest rates, in which the lender pays the borrower interest. These are already in limited use in Europe and Japan, and they’ve become the subject of increasing attention in the U.S. (Paper money is an obstacle, because if interest rates went negative a lot of people would cash out and stuff money into sock drawers—that way, at least, they’d get a zero rate.) Some economists think a quick drop into negative rates during a global economic crisis, like the one in 2008, would have the effect of a defibrillator: there would be a brief jolt, but then the system would get pumping again, and both interest rates and inflation would return to healthy, growth-oriented zones. As things are, rates can’t drop below zero, but they struggle to climb. For these and other reasons, Rogoff told me, some formerly skeptical colleagues have warmed to the idea of phasing out cash. Seriously considering his sunset scenario in the U.S., however, would require looking to a country that has already started toward that horizon.

That country is Sweden, the site of the Västberga heist. Cash circulation, long on the decline, has plunged since the time of the robbery, from a hundred and six billion Swedish crowns, or kronor, to seventy-seven billion last year. In 2013, Sweden eliminated its largest-denomination bill, and demand for its second-largest bill, the five-hundred-krona note (about sixty dollars), surprisingly fell off soon afterward. By 2014, only a fifth of Swedish retail transactions were being conducted in cash. (In the U.S., it’s slightly less than half.) Swedish ticket machines for trains and buses usually take only cards; increasingly, cafés and bars and restaurants refuse cash, too. About half of the country’s bank branches don’t allow withdrawals or deposits in bills. As of a few years ago, “you could see the first signs of Sweden moving toward a true cashless society,” Jacob de Geer, who runs the pan-European, Square-like transaction service iZettle, told me recently. “Many of the smaller shops started putting signs up on their doors saying ‘We Don’t Accept Cash.’ ” In late summer, I flew to Sweden to see what life is like when no one wants the money in your hand.

On an immaculate train from Stockholm’s airport, a conductor in a yellow shirt said that if I’d forgotten to buy a ticket I could pay him the fare, but only with a bank card. “You can go to the ticket counter in our small waiting room, at the station, and pay with Swedish cash,” he said, as if conceding that it was possible, at certain backward rural pubs, to purchase beer with turnips. He brandished his card reader proudly. He was not allowed, he said, a little less proudly, to handle money.

During my walk from the baggage claim to the train platform, I had passed ten ticket machines, all fitted not with coin slots or cash trays but with delicate, recessed card slides. On the train, small, silent screens set at the front of the cabin shuffled between ads for MasterPass, by MasterCard, and English headlines from the morning’s news. “A 27-year-old PhD student has been charged with stealing poisonous substances from Uppsala University as part of an alleged plot to blackmail the Czech Republic into paying large sums of money in Bitcoin,” one item read. Even thieves seemed to have moved on to better things.

I had not. I had withdrawn a wad of Swedish bills, seven hundred kronor (about eighty-three dollars), with the very American goal of keeping myself entertained by trying to spend it around town. The sum was more than I am used to carrying. One thing encouraging the anti-cash crowd is the conduct of the young; a survey of about a thousand U.S. adults, in 2014, found that more than half of those younger than thirty preferred cards to cash even for transactions of less than five dollars. When I run a transaction through my credit card, I get fraud protection, airline miles, and a digital record that I can export into budgeting software and spreadsheets. When I use cash, I get nothing: the transaction disappears. A generation that already orders cabs and music on screens needs no introduction to the joys of a cashless life.

A major social obstacle is privacy. The record of our electronic lives is a convenience, except when it’s an annoyance or worse. In the popular imagination, the black market is buttressed by large metal cases of cash. But many underground transactions are more modest. New Yorkers frequently hire babysitters and housecleaners in cash and do not file the required tax forms; waiters may pocket tips without keeping a tally for the I.R.S. Cash’s fungibility enables slushy bookkeeping. Our willingness to put up with this reflects a sense we have that most people, in life, end up with certain records they would rather not keep.

After checking into my hotel in Stockholm, I went for a stroll to shake off jet lag. The city did not hide its appetite for plastic. Farmers’ stalls in the Hötorget, an old hay-market square, sold Swedish chanterelles and summer berries alongside mangoes shipped from Pakistan. They took cards. The flower-stall guys nearby hawked bouquets of late-summer roses and trimmed bracken. They took American Express. [cartoon id="a20162"]

Later, I wandered into a bar, in the Scandic Grand Central Hotel, and ordered coffee. The bartender had slicked hair and wore a mysteriously tropical shirt. I extracted my wad. “This is a cash-free bar!” he said, alarmed. He pointed to a sign atop the register that said “Cash Free Zone” and featured a picture of some coins and bills overlaid with an enormous “X.”

“Is that a new thing?” I asked, feeling like a smoker who’s had a cigarette plucked from his lips.

“It’s a new thing—two, three months ago,” he said.

“Oh, interesting,” I said. “Why?”

“More security for the people,” he said, handing me a credit-card receipt to sign. “Now write the total amount.”

Sweden seems nearest to stamping out paper currency, but Denmark and Norway are trailing close behind. Ninety-three per cent of consumer transactions in Belgium are now cashless—partly because, like other European countries, it has capped the amount that can legally be paid in cash—and cash use in Australia has fallen by a third in a period of six years. India, whose underground economy is thought to swallow up four hundred and sixty billion dollars annually, has considered capping cash transactions and cash holdings; in a recent radio address, Prime Minister Modi exhorted citizens to turn their backs on cash. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where only about a third of the population have bank accounts but at least sixty per cent have cell phones, mobile payments have begun to leapfrog over paper currency. (About a quarter of Kenya’s gross national product runs through its payment app, M-Pesa.) China, never keen to fall behind, has embraced mobile payments, with mixed success. Having spent two and a half millennia accumulating money, we now find that it weighs us down; we want to sail it through the ether.

Sweden’s bellwether case, though, is distinct, and borne by three overriding causes. A flurry of high-profile robberies, not limited to the Västberga heist, married paper money to security vulnerabilities in the public imagination, and led entities such as the Swedish bank tellers’ union to lobby against cash-handling. (Bank robberies and street muggings have declined notably since the cashless trend began.) The Swedish financial industry realized that fee-inclusive transaction technologies could turn a more handsome profit than cash handovers. And Sweden, a small country with an eye to the digital vanguard, has been a leader in developing new transaction apps and other tools. The appeal has started to sway small, urban businesses. “It’s efficiency, simplicity—we can work with a more modern system, and it’s easier for our staff,” Gül Heper, the former brand director at HTL, a chain of sleek, youth-oriented cash-free hotels, told me. “And security. Because the lounge is open twenty-four hours, and we have a lot of traffic.” In a cashless enterprise, you never have to worry about someone dipping into the till. “You always have to have someone counting cash,” David Zetterström, the co-founder of the boutique bakery chain Fabrique, cashless since February, says. When Zetterström and his wife started the bakery, eight years ago, thirty or forty per cent of all transactions were in cash, and the costs of cash-handling seemed unavoidable. More recently, that figure dropped to less than ten per cent, and credit-card-transaction fees for merchants came down, too. Last year, after Fabrique had four break-ins, Zetterström decided it was time to give the cashless thing a shot.

The security argument for cashlessness has been helped along by support both popular and pop. ABBA the Museum—an interactive athenaeum for the art and artistry of Sweden’s superfamous quartet—does not take cash, mostly owing to the deeply held beliefs of Björn Ulvaeus, the smaller and less bearded of the “B”s.

“What happens to street crime when an advanced economy goes completely cashless?” Ulvaeus, who first registered the risks of cash after his son had a home robbery, wrote to me in an e-mail not long ago. “Why don’t politicians ask questions like that?”

However costly cash-handling is for businesses, it’s more so for the banks. Cash requires elaborate security for transportation and disbursement. It is a pain to track bill by bill. Financial institutions can make money from card transactions and account maintenance, but cash, for all its ubiquity, has questionable returns and a growing air of obsolescence. Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, has recently joined many of its peers in looking at blockchain technology. Björn Segendorf, a Riksbank economist, said it was an “open question” whether the central bank would be issuing digital currency in the future.

“We don’t add any value by handing over cash over the counter,” Mats Torstendahl, an executive vice-president at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, or S.E.B., one of Sweden’s Big Four, told me one afternoon. We were sitting in his office—big by American standards, bigger by Swedish—at a table opposite his desk. When we met, Torstendahl had leaned into my handshake as if into a rusting door handle. Now he settled in his chair in the authoritative lounge pose of a senior financier. He had neatly parted blond hair; round, tortoiseshell glasses; and the Swedish banker’s uniform—a well-cut, sober suit without a tie. There was a delicate orchid in every window of the room. “The banks have consciously been trying to transfer manual cash-handling in our system to automated cash-handling, to decrease risks in the environment for our co-workers,” Torstendahl said.

Per Långsved, a rising manager who is the head of retail banking products, chimed in: “Cash is actually one of the main carriers of diseases in the world!”

In Sweden, banks don’t run proprietary A.T.M.s, as in the U.S. Instead, the five largest jointly own an A.T.M. company, Bankomat. Insisting that every branch also have a vault and a cash-handling teller would be otiose, Torstendahl told me, especially given the sharp decline in cash transactions in the past decade. “Ask a Swedish customer, ‘Do you have cash on you?’ ‘I never have cash on me.’ ‘We are thinking of taking away cash.’ ‘No, you cannot take away cash!’ ‘But you don’t have any cash.’ ‘Yeah, but if I want to have cash you should have cash.’ ‘But you never have cash!’ ”

He leaned back and smiled. “You get into a kind of cash twenty-twosituation.”

To the question of who’s left behind by low-cash life, the answer, in Sweden, rides on three numbers: latitude, age, and wealth. In the rural north, the de-cashing of bank branches changes daily life. Locals, especially those with cash-intensive businesses, like shops, now drive great distances to find a bank that serves their needs. “You have to go to one, two, three, four, five banks until you find one,” said Wiggo Lindgren, a plump, jovial pensioner who is the vice-president of the Småföretagarnas Riksförbund, or National Small Business Association, which represents thirty thousand firms. Today, fifty-three thousand people in Sweden must travel more than eighteen miles to withdraw cash. “One-fifth of them say it would be a disaster if cash went away—they’d have to close their shops,” Lindgren told me. “What we want is some kind of status quo.”

Stasis would suit the elderly, too. Some old people are undaunted by cashless ways of doing business. But many struggle to track debt, quail at smartphones, and forget the pin codes needed for their bank cards. Add to that matters of convenience (some toilets require digital payment, and the elderly are often urgent visitors) and the phasing out of cash seems, to at least one demographic, premature. Christina Tallberg, the chair of the Pensionärernas Riksorganisation, or National Pensioners Organization, told me that, after dues-collecting meetings of her organization, its elderly female treasurer has had to carry a big sack of money on two modes of public transportation in order to reach a bank branch that would accept the deposit.

Both Lindgren’s and Tallberg’s organizations have joined Kontantupproret, “Cash Uprising,” a loose coalition for the preservation of cash. The founder is Björn Eriksson, a former president of Interpol and, it must be noted, chair of the Association of Swedish Private Security Companies, which represents armored trucks and the like. Cash Uprising holds that everybody should be able to get and deposit cash anywhere—the view that Torstendahl and others find so obtrusive. (“History has many sad examples of people who have tried to stand in the way of science, technology and capitalism,” Björn Ulvaeus, of ABBA, wrote me about the group.) Yet Cash Uprising is not quite fringe. “When I speak today with an organization, this is actually one of the key topics, the key frustrations, that they’re very angry about,” says Jan Bertoft, the secretary-general of the Swedish Consumers’ Association, a federation of twenty-four groups, including retirement, disability, and immigrant organizations. The Uprising publishes editorials that are critical of what Eriksson calls “this abnormal way of making it as difficult as possible to use cash out of the pocket.” At first, it tried appealing to the banks, but they wouldn’t engage. So the Uprising and its surrogates moved on to politicians.

One subject of their attention has been Sweden’s deputy minister of finance, Per Bolund. In late June, Christina Tallberg handed him a petition, signed by 139,064 pensioners, asking the government to safeguard the use of cash. Bolund had won some political points recently by attending to the cash concerns of asylum seekers. (He pushed for a plan that would give them quick access to banking services.) [cartoon id="a20369"]

I went to visit Bolund one morning, in a governmental office building. He is a tall man, with the wide, concerned grin of a Boy Scout who has finished tying his ropes but worries about whether he’s done it right. He led me to a conference table at one end of his office and poured piping-hot black coffee from a carafe. He wore a dark suit with a crimson tie of ribbon thinness, tugged into the smallest knot I had ever seen. Bolund’s attitude toward Sweden’s cashless tendencies is both upbeat and circumspect—which is to say, fairly political.

“This is not something that’s been thought out by the government—‘We’re going to be a cashless society’—but, rather, a development from the bottom up, so to speak,” he said. “I will have a dialogue with the private sector, trying to point out that they have a responsibility for giving payment services for all citizens.”

One model, he said, could be Sweden’s alcohol-provision system, which allows Swedes in remote locations to order booze to be delivered, and held, at the nearest store. (Similar systems exist for medication and parcels.) Bolund wants the banks to consider such an arrangement for cash. “If there is not a solution that has been provided by the private actors, there will come a time when we are faced with no other option but to regulate this,” he said—but he preferred to let demand, innovation, and time run their course.

“We have generations of young people now entering the economy who have never used cash, and see no reason whatsoever to start using cash at all,” he went on. “And, of course, for natural reasons the elderly citizen will”—he came to a terrified stop, as if racking his processors for an apt euphemism—“move out of private society, and that will, of course, bring a move toward electronic payments. For natural reasons!”

No passage of time is likely to help the unregistered poor. At some point, I started chatting with panhandlers in Stockholm, all of whom were foreigners, off the Swedish books and social programs. A cheery, gray-bearded Bulgarian man named Atanas told me, through a few words of English and some artful hand gestures, that a miscreant had absconded with eighty thousand kronor (about ninety-three hundred dollars), leaving him penniless. An Austrian woman, Sigrid, who was perched on a street corner, knitting, said that her Austrian pension had been locked. She’d been bouncing around various cities in Europe. Fortunately, she did not find the Swedes less liberal with their cash on the street than any other nationality she’d encountered, and she had managed to save money that she would use to buy a bus ticket elsewhere. “You won’t need a bank card?” I asked. Sigrid laughed. “No, no!” she said brightly. She was old and poor, and just the sort of person no one thinks of when imagining a thriving future, so I hoped that she was right.

In every European city, there are cafés, bars, and restaurants that stand as totems to a youthful cosmopolitan dream. They are tavernlike and multipurpose places. Usually, their customers are under forty-five. The language of first resort is Global English, which extends the present into the continuous and makes bathrooms “toilets”: language that belongs to nobody, and so to all. These are the places where expatriates gather to feel less foreign, and where locals go to avoid losing touch. To visit is to feel lost, but also on the verge of being found.

One of the newest of these spots in Stockholm is Nomad, halfway up a hilly stretch of road, just past the central station. On a Monday evening, I stopped by for a plate of meatballs. Some American guys on the back patio were playing poker. I sat inside, beside three young women clustered around a table over drinks. One, dark-haired and with a nose stud, clutched a packet of tobacco and distractedly rolled a cigarette. Another was a visiting Berliner; the third, a freckled Californian.

The Californian was discussing work and money. “When you’re dying in bed, are you going to think, I wish I had worked those extra twenty hours?” she asked. “Or are you going to think, I wish I’d gone to that place? Right now, we are young. No matter, we’re going to be broke. Yeah?”

“You’re going to spend it,” the woman with the cigarette said. “You’re going to spend it—on the concert ticket, on clothes, on the apartment, whatever. You’re going to spend it. So, like, make sure you’re happy what you spend it on.”

“Travel is definitely the solution,” the Californian said.

A willowy woman from Bonn wandered in, trailing a guy from Peru who wore a fedora. “My roommate!” the Bonn woman called out to the Californian. “You are still here!” Everyone was introduced. The Bonn and Berlin women started speaking German, and the guy in the fedora asked if he could grab a chair from my table. He sat across from the Californian, who began to tell him that she’d love to travel to Peru but that, as a woman, she was worried about going alone. “You are very beautiful, so you would be fine there,” the Peruvian said. They discussed his nation’s landscape.

On the other side of my table, a pair of women, Swedish and Serbian, were playing rummy with two decks of cards, one pale red and the other blue. They got a round of cocktails in coupe glasses and invited me to join them, but it was getting late, and I was almost finished with my meatballs. I asked them whether they often used cash. Usually plastic cards, they said, or else mobile apps. “Even at farmers’ markets and things, people don’t need cash,” the Swede said. The Swedish central bank’s recent release of a new line of bills and coins struck her as foolish. “It’s trying to be more like the E.U.—two-kronor coins and things like that,” she said. “But it’s, like, why? What’s the point? No one uses it anymore.”

To get a clearer sense of forms of money people do use, I went to visit Peter Fredell, whose company runs a mobile wallet called SEQR (“secure”). SEQR launched in 2012, before Apple Pay, and reflects the kind of thinking that drives Sweden’s cashless thrall. Fredell is a garrulous bald man with glasses and a predilection for snus, the tea-bag-like sachets of tobacco that Swedes place underneath their upper lip to buzz their gums. On his wall, he had mounted the bleached skull of a bear, which he’d shot, and a giant swatch of animal fur, which he kept framed—an allusion to the calming “furry wall” in the broad comedy “Get Him to the Greek.”

SEQR, which now carries out tens of millions of transactions globally each year, purports to do most of the things that can be done with cash. When you download the app on your phone, you link it directly to your bank account, not to an existing card number, as with Apple Pay. Retailers key the transactions with designated QR codes (those pixellated, radarlike bar codes) at their registers. SEQR also has a peer-to-peer function, which allows money to be sent to another user, and a “touchless” interface at some registers. Many people have visceral anxieties about doing business with their cell phones, but Fredell insists that it’s the safest money-carrying medium there is.

“When you want to do a payment, we check: Is it the sim card? Yes. Is it the hardware, the same phone? Yes. And do you have the pin code?” He waved his own smartphone. “You can’t really hack that, because this number is unique to this telephone.” Even if somebody broke through all the interlocking keys on one phone, they would have to start all over again on the next. “That means it’s not scalable fraud,” Fredell told me. The flip side of this elaborate security is lost privacy: Big Brother can’t protect you from what he doesn’t see. But Fredell thinks that concern is passing. “Eventually, everyone will pay with their mobile,” he said. “When they will do it is written in the stars.”

Fredell pulled a soggy snus bag from under his lip, swapped it for a new sachet, and suggested that we go shopping. It had rained lightly through the lunch hour, but it was dry now. We walked to one of the big Swedish supermarkets, Hemköp, and toward the sweets section, where Fredell plucked a small bag of Ahlgrens Bilar gummy candies. He took it to the cashier and snapped the QR code on his phone. “I’m waiting for the cashier to put in the amount—there it comes!” he chirped. “I do my pin code, and it’s done.” The cashier offered him a receipt. “I don’t need that,” he said proudly, raising his phone. “I have a total receipt here.”

I thought we were done shopping, but Fredell remembered that he had to buy more snus—I had a hunch that he was always buying more snus—and so we walked to the tobacco counter, and he did the QR-code thing again, this time on a gigantic, ten-cannister column of General snus, which, with gold-foil wrappers, looked like something pillaged from the minibar of a Trump hotel. On the way to another supermarket, Fredell ate candy and sucked snus and talked about the mobile-payments drug market. He waved a slim card sheath under my nose. “This is my wallet—no cash here!” he said. “I made it from eel skin that I fished myself.” [cartoon id="a20003"]

For many people, cash signifies autonomy, but for the young or the technologically adventurous it’s an inhibition on the freedom of self-made exchange. The romance of this notion helps account for the success of Swish, the most popular mobile cash-transfer app in Sweden. Swish, a peer-to-peer service like Venmo, launched in December, 2012. Less than four years later, it is used by half the Swedish population and by ninety per cent of adults under thirty. The service moves money instantly; you need only a recipient’s phone number. Its interface is so simple that it is used for church collections and other basket-passing fare. (On the metro platform one night, I passed a busker with a sign: “If you don’t have Cash, pay with Swish!”) Last summer brought Sweden’s first Swish mugging, when two thugs beat up a man and forced him to Swish them. The criminals were rapidly identified by their account.

The success of the app is striking, because it wasn’t dreamed up by a Zeitgeist-attuned entrepreneur. Swish was conceived, driven, and funded by the Swedish banks. Settling on a Bankomat-type model, they sponsored development together and hired a marketer, Per Ekwall, who had a basic insight into how this new cashless technology would fit the population’s needs.

“I thought, This is about social payments,” Ekwall told me one morning, in the offices of his firm, The World Loves. “It was a big mental leap for banks to think about payments not as a technical thing, or a product, but as a social thing. The value of Swish is nothing unless my best friend has it.”

Ekwall focussed on two groups that he called Innovators and Administrators. The Innovators were early tech adopters. The Administrators were “class parents”—the sorts of people who organize school events and group gifts. Administrators were always arranging things, Ekwall reasoned, so people in their social circles constantly owed them money, and would download a simple app to repay them if requested to do so. In marketing Swish, he aggressively targeted those two groups, on the theory that almost everyone else would get pulled on board as well.

The theory held. Today, some Swedish banks have more Swish transactions than A.T.M. withdrawals. The app has also brought with it an element of cultural identity. “It’s important for Swedish society,” Anders Edlund, who is in charge of Swish at the bank Nordea, told me. “When Swish has production disturbances, it takes, like, one minute, and the big Swedish newspaper writes about it. It’s that important.”

One Saturday night, I put on a jacket and walked through central Stockholm. Cafés on Sturegatan spilled late diners out onto the sidewalk. A group of women with a sign that read “kyssen 10 kr” (“Kiss 10 Kronor”) wandered by, chortling intermittently. Crowds had started to swell outside certain bars and clubs. On a whim, I talked my way past a gray-clad bouncer and climbed a grandiose flight of red-carpeted stairs.

The place was called Sturecompagniet, and it had a cover charge. I took out my wad, but the cashier wanted my American Express. The interior looked like a public spa, set under vaulted ceilings, with a mosaic floor. The music was a soundtrack of millennial nostalgia—Shakira, Snoop, “Ride wit Me”—and a smoke machine shot off sharp plumes of mist. After a while, the Kyssen 10 Kr women drifted in. A woman in a bridal veil danced wildly beneath the lights.

Someone grabbed my shoulder and shouted unintelligibly in my ear. The guy wore a black blazer and a white shirt with a matching pocket square; he had blond hair buzzed close to his scalp. He said his name was Henry, and that he was in town for the weekend to meet girls. In fact, he said, a Superhot Girl was on her way here—did I want to meet her? The smoke cannons fired triumphally behind him. I said that I was always happy to meet anyone. The only thing was, he said, I should pretend that I’d known him all his life. Although I’d said I was a journalist, he had decided that I was a lawyer. I had introduced myself as Nathan, but Henry preferred his own version: Manson.

Henry introduced me to his wingman, Sebastian. He had known Sebastian for years and years, he said, though I now had reason to suspect that claim. “Sebastian, this is Manson,” Henry said.

“Nathan,” I said.

“Manson, Sebastian,” Henry said, pointing a route. “Let’s go outside.”

We wandered out to the sidewalk, where a patio had been set up. The street was quieter. While Henry fussed with his phone, tracking down the Girl, I talked with Sebastian, a grad student from somewhere he described as “like Westeros from ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”

“He likes to make up these complicated stories to try to impress the girls,” Sebastian said. “For example, I am supposed to say that he’s a Russian spy.” Sebastian’s hero was Elon Musk, whom he had never met but whom he considered a model human being. “I really think I’d take a bullet for that guy,” he told me.

We spoke about the Hyperloop of Elon Musk, and the American election, and the awfulness of Swedish trains in winter. Henry periodically checked in with updates: the Girl was en route. At some point, he began to call me Nitch. He approached a guy on the patio, well dressed, with salt-and-pepper hair. “You look great!” Henry declared. The guy was a Canadian named Eric, and Henry urged him to stay and meet the Superhot Girl, too. “This is Nitch,” Henry said, pinching my shoulder. “I’ve known him forever.”

“Nathan,” I said.

“Nitch is an Italian lawyer,” Henry said. It occurred to me then that Henry was gathering a dream team of random strangers to hang out with him, the better to impress the Girl. I felt moved by his attention to her happiness.

Henry wandered off because it was the Superhot Girl’s birthday, or so he said, and he was trying to get her in for free. It struck me that, as much as cashless life enabled one kind of cosmopolitan fluidity—no more costly money-changing across borders, the breezy trust that comes with financial lucidity—it impeded another. With a pocket of cash, you could be anyone: a Russian spy, a birthday celebrant, an avvocato out for a night on the town. With a cashless trail, you were fated always to be what you had always been; you couldn’t flee far from your name, your purchases, even your network of friends. You were always, by your cards or cell phone, outed as yourself.

For Americans, who lack the institutional trust of the Swedes, cashlessness feeds paranoia. And, for the U.S. government, it might mean more unwanted chores. Rogoff believes that the prickliest details of a cashless transition would rise from the de-facto regulation it prompts. Suddenly, small-scale marijuana purchases and the like, mainly overlooked to spare an overburdened penal system, would become conspicuous. Negligible tax evasions of the babysitter variety, less rewarding for the I.R.S. to pursue, would emerge. Do Americans, fetishists of self-invention and self-interest, want that much clarity? “Sweden has been very fast at doing these things—they’re incredible,” Rogoff told me. “But they’re very determined. I don’t think we’d be as determined. It would take a while.”

On the patio, the three of us—Sebastian, Eric, and Nitch—began talking about money. Eric had been travelling a lot, and he had noticed something different in Sweden. “I have a routine when I arrive in a place,” he said. He’d go to the A.T.M. and take out cash. In Sweden, he’d been having trouble getting rid of it. Maybe, someone said, it really is all about precious metals. Sebastian looked across the busy street. “It’s so strange,” he said. “We need food. But do we need gold? Do we need silver? These are things we find.”

What do we want from money? As Henry finally connected with his Superhot Girl and—looking as charmed and uxorious as I have ever seen a person—led her up the carpeted stairs toward his bizarre, makeshift posse, I began to thinkthat, beyond home and nurture, what we seek in most currency is a way to mete out dreams. So far, the U.S. still embraces cash, because our concept of wealth is material: we collect it, handle it, hoard it. American money is private. Sweden has embraced cashlessness more readily in part because it finds the value of currency in the transfer and velocity, the social path it follows, the bonds it traces. It’s social: a network conception of wealth. The two conceptions met on nights like this, when fantasies and friendships came together in a hideaway of space and time, remaking each other among fleeting opportunities. We weren’t thieves, and yet we lived as if we were.

Soon after that, I left and walked toward my hotel. It was crisp and fresh out, and I stopped in at a restaurant, to delay the end of a long night just a little while longer. “We don’t take cash,” the waitress said when the bill came. I was tired; the expense was small. I felt a small rush of acquittal as I paid. ♦

This article appears in other versions of the October 10, 2016, issue, with the headline “Cashing Out.”

http://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/here-are-the-top-cashless-countries-in-the-world/story/241430.html

Here are the top cashless countries in the world

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TOP CASHLESS COUNTRIES